Delete Away The Pain
Anna Bahney: “While the Internet has sped up modern dating and made encyclopedic records about love interests more readily available, the magic of digital erasure allows the other end of a relationship, the bust-up, to be just as seamless: the lovelorn can simply delete away the pain.”
The article later discusses the stuff that can't be deleted, such as the postings to websites over which you have no control or, say, Usenet newsgroup postings. There are some things that I've written on websites over which I have no control that I'm not proud of, but I'm doing my best to say to myself "it was an accurate reflection of how I felt at the time" and move on.
Laren: “I would imagine that, in a situation where I was seriously invested emotionally with someone and it didn't work out, that I'd like to do something similar to a digital shoebox -- maybe burn everything onto a CD and file it away somewhere. I even printed out a bunch of emails from a particularly traumatic breakup a while back and put them into the appropriate shoebox. But regardless of my method of saving -- I'd never erase them permanently. Each relationship is part of who I am, and zapping it into cyber-oblivion is not the answer for me.”
I deleted a bunch of emails from a friend who I had crushed on—I'd like to call the crush a rookie mistake, but that was not the case—and a year or so later looked back thinking they were still there. Before that I burned every note and card my ex gave me, because I didn't need the reminder of not only how bad it was, but how good it was.
Burning the notes and cards and deleting the emails happened so long ago that I don't remember whether or not I regret doing either.
